Walmart and Food Sovereignty? Dreams of the Local Food Commissariat

A defining moment,  courtesy of the Oxford World Dictionary...

Commissariat. 

Pronunciation:/ˌkɒmɪˈsɛːrɪət/

• 1 chiefly Military department for the supply of food and equipment.
• 2 a government department of the USSR before 1946.

Origin. late 16th century (as a Scots legal term denoting the jurisdiction of a commissary, often spelled commissariot): from French commissariat, reinforced by medieval Latin commissariatus, both from medieval Latin commissarius 'person in charge', from Latin committere 'entrust'

Company announces plan to reformulate processed foods

Shoreline, WA. On January 20, Walmart announced plans to reformulate the ingredients of their in-house or private brand processed foods. An estimated 60 percent of the company's annual grocery revenues are currently tied to the sale of processed food items. It is therefore expected that this formula change will place pressure on other private suppliers to follow suit.

This is perhaps the single, most significant news story emerging in the corporate agrifood business sector with implications for food sovereignty and food justice movements across the world. Indeed, the company is touting its plan as a response to Michelle Obama's call on the agrifood industry to clean-up its act of poisoning our nation's children with highly processed foods. She has specifically called on companies to reformulate processed foods by reducing sugar, sodium, and fat content.  Apparently, the company is making much of its efforts to listen to critics.

Walmart executives announced they plan to reduce the sodium content of processed foods by a quarter and eliminate all added sugars across many selected items in their private brand lines of processed foods by 2015. They also announced a plan to eliminate all remaining trans-fats in their private brand lines. These would include items like luncheon meat, yogurt, salad dressing, and juice and soda products.

Of course, critics, including Marion Nestle, already note that these reductions will still largely result in unhealthy amounts of sodium and sugar in processed foods. The reformulations will still exceed the recommended daily intake of these additives by 50 to 70 percent when seen in the context of three meals per day.

Company executives name 'food deserts' as a priority

The First Lady has also been calling for increased access by all consumers to fresh fruits and vegetables. This is widely seen as representing an effort to mobilize support to address the role that 'food deserts' play in the nation's unequal geography of hunger and malnutrition in both urban and rural areas. 

The social science community has been studying 'food deserts' at least since Robert Gottlieb first used the term in a 1996 report prepared for the University of California Transportation Center on strategies for food-related transportation in low-income, transit-dependent communities.
 

Food deserts can be defined as residential areas that lack grocery stores, farmers markets, or other places where residents may shop for or grow their own fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and other unprocessed foods. Food deserts are characterized by a preponderance of cheap and unhealthy fast foods or mini-market and convenience stores that sell processed foods at inflated prices. Finally, food deserts are also typified by a lack of privately-owned cars and limited public transportation. There is no easy way to get fresh healthy food to the mouths of the people living in a food desert

Walmart's plan includes changes in new store locations that would allow it to operate in urban core or inner-city neighborhoods that are currently harmed by food desert conditions.  There has been widespread opposition, at least in Southern California, to the opening of 'mega-stores' in the inner-city.  The ecological footprint would have to be greatly down-sized for these stores to become acceptable in many communities. The Walmart supply chain would seek to source and stock more local fruits and vegetables. How it will do this and also address social justice concerns of farm workers and the protection of endangered small farms with heritage and heirloom crops remains unclear.

Walmart stores are predominantly located in suburban or rural areas and, according to my own estimates, their current revenue from sales of fresh fruits and vegetables relies on national or globalized commodity chains for at least 80 percent of all perishable fresh foods on their shelves. 

Over the past 2 to 3 years, Walmart has featured 'local foods' as seasonal niche products in some stores including one in Alamosa, Colorado that I have personally visited. The past two summers (in 2009 and 2010), that store was selling English peas produced and supplied by organic acequia farmers from the San Luis, Colorado area located about 45 miles away. Locally-sourced corn, potatoes, Mexican calabacitas, and other seasonal vegetables are also sold at the Alamosa store.

An honest effort to move away from globalized food chains?

'Power' lunches are not a proletarian perk. Like a black hole, capital bends and warps the gravity of our living time, converting as much of it into working time that produces profit. Capital seeks to trap all our time inside the singularity of work time.  Escaping that singularity must be a principle of a well-grounded movement for food sovereignty.

Walmart executives clearly want us to see their plan as an honest and thoughtful effort to address the geography of environmental racism in the agrifood system while turning as much as possible to local sources and suppliers. They claim to recognize the disparate nature of the conditions in food deserts and thus aim for policies tempered by the fact that food deserts are predominantly located in low-income and/or people of color communities.

Several critical issues are at stake in making sense of the Walmart plan to reformulate processed foods and transform its supply chain toward more local sourcing of fruits and vegetables as well as meat and fish. One issue is differential access to fresh food and commodity prices. Marion Nestle noted in a recent NPR interview that the price of processed food has decreased by 40 percent since 1980 while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent during the same period. 

How Walmart goes about cutting prices for fruits and vegetables, reversing the trends of the past thirty years of marketing and sourcing, is also a puzzle. What will this mean for small farmers? What is local? What about social justice? None of the proposals in the plan addressed the continued exploitation and suffering of marginalized farm worker communities or the survival of small family farmers. 

Moreover: No matter how serious and honest Walmart is in pursuit of this initiative, the sort of change required will have to occur in other organizations that shape, constrain, and control the agrifood system. First and foremost is the U.S. Department of Agriculture which must expand its commitment to a paradigm shift from global to local food systems. This would require radical restructuring of the subsidy, research, rural development, resource conservation, credit market, and other facilities in its purview that will be reauthorized in the 2012 Farm Bill.

Yet even this is not the end of the story. Food and nutrition are important but eating and dietary practices are constrained and shaped by cultural practice and social class position. We need a paradigm shift: One that recognizes that having access to fresh fruits and vegetables will not mean much if no one is around to prepare, serve, and share the food.

We may do well to recall that so-called 'convenience', 'processed', and 'fast' foods were developed because capitalism intensified and expanded the labor time it demands from workers and consumers. 'Power' lunches are not a proletarian perk. Like a black hole, capital bends and warps the gravity of our living time, converting as much of it into working time that produces profit. Capital seeks to trap all our time inside the singularity of work time.  Escaping that singularity must be a principle of a well-grounded movement for food sovereignty.

Local sourcing + freedom from work = food sovereignty

There are many reasons to remain constructively engaged yet skeptical of these efforts. Walmart's plan in the long term must eliminate processed foods altogether and it must downsize individual store footprints. My strongest objection is, frankly, that the last thing the democratic and grassroots food sovereignty movement needs is for Walmart to become the centralized Local Foods Commissariat.

Local sourcing of food is a good principle, but it matters who controls the process. It also matters how the process is organized; is it top-down or bottom-up? Increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables in food desert and low-income communities is also a good principle, but many of these are working-poor families and parents have to work two or three jobs just to avoid homelessness. 

Lacking living wage jobs and affordable transit options, when are working poor parents to find time and resources to shop for fresh ingredients they still can't afford to prepare wholesome meals for their families on a daily basis? Too many of these are single-parent families, mostly headed by women in such circumstances with multiple jobs and marginal earnings.

The demands of the local food movement are insufficient as the basis for any sort of deeply transforming and wider re-organization of the nation's political economy of food and agriculture. We need to be asking ourselves: How do we create an economy where people do not live to work but work to live?  An economy where people have the option to work less and play, pray, learn, cook, and share the table to eat together more?

Can living wage and 35-hour work week laws help resolve this problem by making it possible for people to work at single well-paid jobs instead of wasting their lives trapped in 60+ hours a week spread over three menial part-time and low-paying jobs that still keep families at bare subsistence?

If people can earn a just, living wage will this reduce the length of the work day and week, creating more free time and opportunities for people, including those families trapped in food deserts, to enjoy local shopping, cooking, and conviviality? Is not freedom from work the necessary precondition for people to enjoy sharing wholesome food at the dinner table with their loved ones and friends?

The path away from food deserts must also run along the road toward economic justice and workplace democracy. The goal of food sovereignty is ultimately not possible without these other values.

Environmental justice

...and the Derivatives Depression

Monetarism is based on the von Hayek-von Mises Austrian school, which started when a bunch of rent-gouging Viennese landlords wanted to abolish rent control and hired some scribblers to prove that “the market” was always infallible and government is always the enemy. Von Hayek got his chance under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back rickets, scurvy and pellagra for British working people. The dumbed-down US version of the same doctrine is Milton Friedman and his Rockefeller-funded Chicago School, which got its big road test under the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile. 

Wesbster Tarpley, End Wall Street bankers rule – End the derivatives depression

Seattle, WA. Preparing for the start of 2011 Winter Quarter teaching duties at the University of Washington, I am pondering what to emphasize to students during the first day of classes.  I am teaching two seminars this winter quarter: One is focused on the study of food sovereignty movements; the second is a 'theory' seminar on the contributions of anthropology to the comparative study of social movements in the Mesoamerican Diaspora.

I already see numerous connections between the two: Food sovereignty and theories of social movements. The first problem that occurs to me may not be at all obvious. This is the problem posed by the advent of what Christian Marazzi and others have called cognitive capitalism. This is the idea of a cyberspace-based realm of 'high finance' that profits from the construction of complicated credit default obligations, collateralized debt obligations, and other financial instruments that basically allow for the extraction of surplus value out of speculative thin air through the commodification of 'risk.'

This development, Marazzi argues, has altered everything. I would add: Including the prospects and methods needed for the multitude to escape hunger, malnutrition, and structural violence.

Marazzi, a member of the Italian autonomist/post-workerist school of thought, develops the theory of immaterial labor and cognitive capital in his 2008 book Capital and Language.

Echoing similar arguments made by Hardt and Negri in Multitude and Commonwealth, Marazzi argues that the transformation of material (physical) labor into immaterial labor is the source of new forms of surplus value fashioned by finance capitalists. This occurs through the use of highly secret algorithmic models, some developed by theoretical physicists, that have been all the rage as the Wall Street mandarins try to respond to von Hayek's posing of the problem of informational limits in finance capital's 'dances with prices'.

The new forms of accumulation of surplus value rely not on the extraction of unpaid labor time beyond that which is socially necessary, or even through remote command over actual objects, persons, raw materials, or factories (assembly lines, etc). Rather, the new accumulation is based on the exploitation of abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation. 'Cloud' computing produces surplus value for capital through the unpaid mental labor time of internet users and consumers of software apps. Cloud sourcing of the apps is the archetype of this form of value which is easily veiled behind the guise of the intellectual commons and user democracy.

An overlooked contributor to this intriguing discussion is Webster Tarpley who recently published a short essay, cited in the opening epigraph, that reminds me of some of the early work by the autonomist Mario Tronti on the transition from Fordist mass production and the mass worker to the Keynesian state and the rise of the social factory and social worker. 

Ignored by the left, Tarpley's essay has received the most attention in the right-wing blogs linked to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the flagship site for the continued presence on the Web of the Austrian ordo-liberal discourse that got all this started in the first place. 

Why has Tarpley so irritated the ordoliberals? What probably has the ordoliberals in such a tizzy is that in a mere 4 pages Tarpley provides a pithy and damning critique of some fifty years of neoliberal theoretical scribblings. He also provides an indictment of forty-plus years of dominance as the underlying ideological rationale for America's 'shock doctrine' policies dating back to the overthrow of Chile's President Allende.

Tarpley's critique is grounded in a basic recognition that:

Today's depression has been caused by 40 years of monetarist-inspired deregulation. Derivatives were illegal from 1936 until Reagan legalized them in 1982. Then Wendy Gramm, Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers teamed up to start the derivatives bubble during the Clinton years. Now there are $1.5 quadrillion of derivatives strangling the world economy. Derivatives, not subprime mortgages, are the reason for today's crisis. Today's depression also comes from privatization...opening the door to the looting excesses which are now well known. The oil market is deregulated, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were quick to exploit this situation. This past summer, when you were paying over $4 a gallon for gas, more than half of that was going directly to Wall Street hedge fund hyenas, with a full $1 per gallon for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley alone, the backers of the deregulated offshore ICE exchange.

All true; Especially the part about a 'quadrillion' in toxic derivatives that include mortgage backed securities, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, repo agreements, and other fancy cognitive instruments. These toxic assets wait in the algorithmic shadows of the circuits of finance capital. Eventually, the collapse of these quadrillion in derivatives will vampire-like suck whatever remains of the money-form of value in the lifeblood of the material as opposed to the virtual economy.

With a nod to Marx, it can be argued that the virtual vampire economy is steadily undermining the ability and/or proclivity of the industrial capitalist sector, especially in China, to negotiate the circuit of the reproduction of capital since derivatives are draining the system of access to productive capital which in turn interferes with the ability to sustain extended exploitation of living labor time in the actual process of material production; this includes the all important food and agriculture sectors.

If you think matters have been bad during the presumed (and jobless) recovery to the so-called 'Great Recession,' bear in mind that the current phase of this crisis is the unfolding of a longer-term systemic economic collapse that will come in distinct waves over the next 10-20 years of transition away from a unipolar world dominated by the USA as some economic superpower hegemon. The 2008-10 phase involves a mere $1.6 trillion of the quadrillion in toxic assets globally.

In other words, we are still witnessing the earliest stages of the disintegration of the commodity of risk regime that neoliberals created out of speculative thin air to aid and abet finance capital and its  'dances with prices.' 

Vampire capital sucks the blood out of the material world, and the poor get hungrier...

Tarpley overlooks one truly important point from the vantage of environmental justice and food sovereignty. And this is how Wall Street's Derivative vampirism has transformed and affected our entire global agri-food system. Crop, pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer prices are volatile and this condition  of uncertainty affects distribution and access to food. The points of access have also been subjected to the speculative algorithmic exercises that seek to commodify risk and end up starving millions to death while leading a billion others into the agonizing perfidy of malnutrition.

Just as Thatcher brought rickets, scurvy and pellagra to the British working class, so too neoliberal policies in the USA since Reagan have taken us on a trajectory toward increasing hunger, homelessness, diasplacement, historical trauma, and structural violence. Neoliberal wrecking balls have destroyed the 'House of Labor' and its New Deal social contract obligations and transformed us into a nation of obese fast food consumers.

The neoliberal form of governmentality emphasizes the operation of the unregulated free market as the ultimate model that is the basis for the construction and evaluation of all social and behavioral policy including in areas like public health and environmental quality of life.  Neoliberalism delegates to the individual the privilege of exercising the 'autonomy' of 'self-care.' And if you don't care for your self, that is your choice, and you simply deserve to die.

This Randian ideology rationalizes the neoliberal destruction of institutions of collective action by disqualifying the legitimacy of the 'social wage' and other forms of guaranteed livelihood income that were such a central part of the 'productivity deal' that Keynes got FDR to impose on workers and capital to save capitalism from itself. Now, it looks like current neoliberal budgetary moves are set to replay not 1929 but 1935, and with two wars front-loaded!

The eco-justice alternative

The environmental justice movement embraces and nurtures the widening struggles for the restoration of the commons against new enclosures and privatization. It launches actions toward an end to corporate and military destruction of the Earth. It does so because environmental justice principles privilege the concept of the Earth not as a commodity, natural resource, or wilderness to be kept separate from humans, but as the life support system of humans and all other organisms.

This means that there are no 'externalities,' and the destruction of the Earth's life support system is a cost to every organism on the planet. The growing episodes of food shortages and increasing difficulty experienced by many communities in gaining or maintaining access to safe and potable drinking water are results of the commodification of risk and a predatory economy based on speculative investments in hedge funds that bet for or against starvation-related mortality rates.

Clearly, capitalism is quickly running out of things to turn into wooden-headed commodities. Capital owns patents on life and patents on thought (intellectual property). It is selling pollution like a tradeable development damage permit and arrogantly claims ownership of a growing number of gene sequences or genes that form part of our genome. Capital also discounts the cost of this arrangement to the planet and its inhabitants. One consequence of this regime is that the world has an ever larger mass of hungry and malnourished people.

What will be the stake that we use to punch through the soulless heart of this vampire?

The environmental justice movement provides an interesting set of responses to that question. First and foremost is the idea that we must not allow capitalism to continue to 'discount' (deny and ignore) the social, environmental, cultural, and health costs of this predatory, increasingly vampire-like economy.

I expect that even the smartest theoretical physicist will in the end find that the algorithms all lead back to the same place: Mass mobilization of the multitude in the streets in a movement that sublates the political economy of death, hunger, and violence. Therein lies my hope in the rise and spread of an alterNative solidarity economy.